School Beat; Evansville Schools outlines strategy for attendence

(Ed.note; This is a portion of the recent School Reports of the Evansville School District.)


Planning for Student Success


When you do well, it is often harder to show progress. On the surface, our school attendance rates look
good. We will discuss later in the agenda, what we find when we dig below that surface. In the majority
of cases, if students have poor attendance, their learning suffers and often their attendance rates get worse
as they try to avoid situations where they feel unsuccessful. The table included in your packet shows how
attendance rates drop off sharply at middle and high school. A portion of this change is simply tied to how
absences are counted in the system. A middle school student absent for 4 or more of 9 periods is
considered absent for the whole day and a high school student is counted absent for the whole day if they
miss more than 2 periods. We are preparing a spreadsheet that focuses on students with 15 or more
absences last year, their WKCE and MAP scores, qualification for free or reduced lunch, and special
education status. We will look at these results as a K-12 team to identify families where more than one
student appears on the list. We will identify students and families we want to intervene with proactively
with this year, not simply wait for the numbers in the attendance policy to kick in. We will plan a series of
interventions, school/ student/family conferences and resources we can bring together to help these
students and, in some cases, whole families increase the likelihood for success in school and preparation
for the world they enter after high school.